Homer – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Author’s Note for THE JEREMIAH CHRONICLES

Here’s the author’s note at the end of Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles. It’s the only content in the omnibus that isn’t available anywhere else, and I don’t want my readers to feel like they have to buy something they’ve already read in order to get it. And if you do want to buy it, there’s a link in the sidebar over there. ———–>

I put an author’s note at the end of every ebook I publish. It adds a little bit to the progress bar, which can be annoying for readers who expect “the end” to come at 100%, but I think it’s good to briefly tell the story behind the story. It’s certainly something that I would enjoy reading at the end of some of my favorite books (especially the ones by David Gemmell!). Whether you read them or whether you skip over them, it’s a feature I plan to keep in every ebook I release.

So, here it is!

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One of the questions writers get asked the most is ‘where do you come up with your ideas?’ Honestly, that’s probably the hardest question to answer. Orson Scott Card said that everyone runs across at least a thousand story ideas each day, and a good writer will see maybe three. To that, I would add that it might take years before you realize that you’ve seen them.

The idea that eventually grew into Star Wanderers probably came to me the first time I saw Serenity. At the beginning of the movie, there’s this long continuous shot that shows the space ship from the hangar bay doors to the cockpit. I don’t even remember what the characters were talking about, I was just mesmerized by that shot. For weeks, I dreamed about having my own starship like the Serenity, where I could escape the stresses of college and lead an adventurous life out among the stars. I still daydream about it to this day. Having my own starship and piloting it to places where I can be free and independent is one of my greatest recurring fantasies.

Another major catalyst for the idea that became this story was the Lombardo translation of Homer’s Odyssey. The Odyssey is perhaps the most famous epic work of all time, but the Lombardo translation struck a particular chord with me because of how down-to-earth and accessible it is. Instead of some stodgy 19^th century translation that passes for cruel and unusual punishment in some high schools, this one made the story come alive. I was first introduced to it in a Western Civ class in college, but enjoyed it so immensely that I picked up a copy over the summer of 2009 and read the whole thing.

As I read it, I couldn’t help but notice the potential for a science fiction crossover. What if the sailing ships were starships, and the oceans the vastness of space? The islands would be like planets, with their strange and exotic cultures, and travel from world to world would be as arduous and difficult as it was for Odysseus to return to Ithaca. A new form of paganism would emerge, one that worshiped the stars and planets just as the Greeks worshiped the rivers and trees. The starfaring people would be as hardy and self-reliant as the ancient Greeks, and as antagonistic toward the more civilized Coreward peoples as the Aegeans to the Trojans. Most importantly, though, the starfarers would feel a sense of powerlessness as they faced the unforgiving vastness of space, just like Odysseus as he braved the wine-dark sea.

I actually started writing that novel in 2010, and got about a hundred pages into it before moving on to the revisions for Bringing Stella Home. Later, I trunked it, but the basic world-building stayed with me as I continued to expand the Gaia Nova universe with Desert Stars and Heart of the Nebula.

The final catalyst for Star Wanderers was the love story from one of my favorite Westerns, Jeremiah Johnson. My college roommates introduced me to that movie my sophomore year, and just like Serenity, I spent the next several days daydreaming what it would be like to be a mountain man. I went to college in Utah, so the frontier landscape where the film was shot is very familiar to me (in fact, I’m writing this author’s note from Slide Canyon just outside of Provo). But the love story—that was the best part. An accidental marriage from a cultural misunderstanding that blossoms into something touching and wonderful, in spite of the language barrier—by far, that was my favorite part of the whole movie.

All of these ideas were bouncing around somewhere in the back of my mind for years, but it wasn’t until 2011 that they all came together. I had graduated about a year and a half before, and was working a number of low-skilled temp jobs, trying to make ends meet as I grew my writing career. I was between projects, trying to work on Edenfall (sequel to Genesis Earth), but nothing was coming together and I just felt very frustrated.

One day, as I was lying on my bed daydreaming for the umptieth time about escaping this planet on my own starship, the thought “what would Jeremiah Johnson look like if it were set in space?” came to me. It was like a supernova exploding in my mind, illuminating my imagination with the power of an exploding star. For the next half hour, I worked through all the details in my head—the famine backstory of Megiddo Station, the Oddysey-like far-future space setting, the wandering lifestyle of the mountain man turned starship pilot. And then, once I’d replayed it half a dozen times in my head and worked myself up to a fever pitch, I rolled out of bed and wrote the first chapter of Outworlder almost exactly as it now stands. The rest of that novelette came just as readily, and in a couple of weeks I had a finished draft.

As a young single guy in my early twenties, I tend to think about love and relationships a lot. I think it’s a myth that women are somehow more interested in romance than men—we just express that interest in different ways. At Worldcon 2011 in Reno, Louis McMaster Bujold said that women tend to write about love and life, whereas men tend to write about love and death, and I’ve found that to hold very true, at least in my own writing. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy and natural to come up with the backstory that put Noemi on Jeremiah’s starship. The rest, with the pregnancy, the polygamy issues, and the baby at the end, all came naturally as I wrote things out. I was originally going to have Noemi miscarry about halfway through Fidelity, but realized almost immediately that that wasn’t going to fly. Once I realized that the natural ending of the story arc would be the birth of their son, everything else just came together.

My goal from the beginning was to write something that I could submit to the Writers of the Future contest. For that reason, I kept Outworlder fairly short. However, when I got to the end, I realized that there was still a lot of story left unwritten, so I decided to follow it out. I’m more of a novel writer than a short story writer, so it was natural to structure the overall story arc in that way. At the same time, I really enjoyed the intimacy of that first novelette, and the way that the shorter structure allowed me to focus on one or two characters and their relationships with each other. Those were all considerations that pushed me into following the novella format, as well as the chance to experiment with publishing a series of shorter works.

Fidelity and Sacrifice were a lot more challenging to write, in particular Sacrifice. Part of this was because I was still trying to figure out where the overall story arc was going, and part of it was because some of the subject matter (such as polygamy) seemed pretty unconventional for a science fiction story. But after taking a couple of short breaks to work on other projects, I managed to push through it, eventually getting to Homeworld which came much more easily. I’ve always been better at endings than at middles, and I went into Homeworld knowing that it would conclude Jeremiah’s main story arc.

As I was working on the later parts to the Star Wanderers series, I moved to the Republic of Georgia to teach English for a year. That had a tremendous impact on how I wrote the language barrier between Jeremiah and Noemi, mostly because my experience was quite similar. I didn’t accidentally marry a Georgian girl (though there are one or two who I still miss sometimes), but when I showed up in the airport in Tbilisi, I didn’t speak a word of Georgian and knew almost nothing about the people or the country. Needless to say, it was quite an adventure. The stresses of living in a foreign culture did slow down my writing a bit, but I managed to get it back by the end and finished Homeworld before coming back to the States for the summer.

When I first started publishing the Star Wanderers series, I saw it as a sort of side project that I would do before getting back to other projects. However, this series has proven to be more popular than any of my other books, so I’ve decided quite happily to expand it. The Jeremiah Chronicles contains the full story arc for Jeremiah, but there are a lot of other characters who I want to explore, and the novella format is perfect for that. If you have any in particular that you’d like to revisit, feel free to shot me an email at joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know. I love getting fan mail and do my best to respond to it, so any comments would definitely be appreciated.

If you’ve just discovered Star Wanderers and would like to keep up with the newest books in the series, you can get them for free by signing up for my mailing list. Whenever I release a new Star Wanderers story, I put out a two-week coupon code to get it for free on Smashwords and send the coupon code out to my subscribers via my email newsletter. That way, you don’t have to feel like you’re spending too much once I have fifteen or twenty ebooks out. I figure that if you enjoy these stories enough to sign up for the mailing list, you’ll probably tell a friend or post a favorable review, so I’m happy to make my new Star Wanderers releases available for free.

I hope you enjoyed this omnibus! If you did, please consider posting a review or sharing it with a friend. Every little bit helps, and the more people discover and read this series, the more stories I’ll be able to write. My goal from the beginning has been to make a living telling stories that I love, and it looks like Star Wanderers might actually make that possible.

In the meantime, don’t be a stranger—you can find me on Twitter (@onelowerlight), Goodreads, or Facebook (Joe Vasicek), but the best way to keep up is to follow my blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs. I’ve been blogging since 2007 and plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future. You can also find links to all my books there, on all the major sites where they’re published. And of course, if you want to sign up for my mailing list, you can find the sign-up form on the sidebar.

That’s just about it. Thanks for reading! It’s readers, not writers, who really make a story come alive, and at the end of the day the greatest honor is simply to be read. So thanks for taking a chance on this one, and until next time, I hope to see you around!

E is for Empire

Almost every far future science fiction story has a galactic empire of some kind. From Dune to Foundation, from Star Wars to Firefly, there’s always someone trying to rule the galaxy, often in a way that makes life difficult for the protagonists.

Why? Rule of drama, of course, but also because it gives the story a truly epic scope. Just as the classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are as much about entire civilizations as they are about the people characters within them, so it is with science fiction, especially space opera. Combine that with science fiction’s forward-thinking nature, and you have the potential for some truly amazing stories about humanity’s destiny among the stars.

But why empire? Because even if we make it out to the stars, we’ll probably still take with us all of the baggage that makes us human. Science fiction may be forward looking, but history repeats itself, and you can’t have a clear view of the future without understanding and acknowledging the past.

Not all galactic empires are evil, but most of them are. We shouldn’t have to look further than the real-world history of Imperialism to see why. Oppression, exploitation, slavery, genocide–all of these have been done in the name of Empire, and many more evils besides. Even benevolent hegemonic powers (such as, I would argue, the United States of America) often end up doing great harm, either through action or inaction.

Of course, all of this makes for some really great stories. When Asimov wrote his Foundation series, he quite literally based it on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he drew extensively from his background as an orientalist and based the overworld story on the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Star Wars is based loosely on the collapse of the Roman Republic, and Firefly echoes many of the old Western tales of former Confederate soldiers heading west after the US Civil War.

It’s worth pointing out that the Galactic Empire is by no means the only form of political organization in space opera. There are actually several, including:

The Federation — A loose organization of stars and planets that usually exists to foster cooperation and mutual peace between galactic civilizations. Rarely evil, but can be crippled by red tape.
The Republic — A more centralized version of the Federation, typically. Exercises more control over its citizens, but not in an oppressive way. Usually features some form of representative government.
The Alliance — A team of political underdogs united to overthrow the Empire and establish a more just form of government in its place. If they win, they usually become the Republic or the Federation.
The Kingdom — A smaller government within the larger political system, often struggling for survival against more powerful forces. Not always democratic, but is often good, at least to its own citizens.
The Hegemonic Empire — Like the Empire, but rules primarily through soft power, ie co-opting their enemies rather than crushing them. May overlap with the Republic or the Federation.
The People’s Republic of Tyranny — The Empire pretending to be the Federation.
The Vestigial Empire — What the Empire becomes when it’s been defeated but not yet destroyed. Still oppressive and evil, but rules a smaller territory and struggles for relevance and survival.
The Remnant — An element from the Alliance that’s gone rogue. The war may be over, but these guys are still fighting it, even if they’ve lost sight of what they’re fighting for.
The Horde — A highly aggressive and expansionist warlord state. By far the most violent and brutal of any political organization, it seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire galaxy.

As a political science major, all these forms of government really fascinate me. I’ve played with quite a few of them, especially the Horde (Bringing Stella Home), the Empire (Desert Stars), the Hegemonic Empire (Star Wanderers), the Kingdom (Stars of Blood and Glory), and the Remnant (also Stars of Blood and Glory). You can definitely expect to see me play with them again in the future.

Trope Tuesday: The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test is a way to measure how prominently women figure in a story. It mostly comes up in discussions of TV and film, but can also be applied to works of literature. To pass the test, the story must have

at least two named female characters
who talk to each other
about something other than men.

The surprising thing, as you can see in this discussion of the trope, is that so few stories actually pass this test. Even in literature, works like The Odyssey, Romeo & Juliet, and even War & Peace fail to pass or only barely pass this test.

Closely related to the Bechdel Test is the Smurfette Principle, where only one of the major characters is female–the token chick. Stories that fail to pass the first part of the test fall into this category.

So why does this happen? It may be because most writers are male, but that isn’t necessarily true of books and literature. Novel writing, after all, was originally considered a womanly pursuit, and the English major was created in the so that women could have something to study while they were in college. Not surprisingly, 19th century works by female writers like the Bronte sisters tend to pass…

…or do they? It’s been a while since I read Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, but the impression I got was that the women in those books spend only really talk with each other about men. And when you look to contemporary writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, the trend holds. After all, how many female characters are there in A Christmas Carol? Do any of them ever even talk to each other?

This isn’t necessarily a measure of how good or bad a story is, or even of how feminist it is (Aliens, after all, technically passes), but it is a measure of how independent and well rounded the female characters really are. If the story doesn’t pass, it’s a sign that the women only play a role in relation to the men, or that the male characters are the ones who advance the plot.

I don’t usually like to bring up my own stories in relation to these tropes, but I thought it would be useful to apply this test to my own books and see how they shape up. As a writer, I think it’s a good idea to do this periodically, to make sure my work isn’t slipping into a rut. So here we go:

Genesis Earth

Point 1: Yes, there are two named female characters: Terra and Stella.

Points 2 & 3: No, they never talk. However, when you apply the reverse Bechdel test (two men who talk to each other about something other than women), Genesis Earth only barely passes. Michael talks with Tom in the first chapter, mostly about Terra, and for the rest of the book he and Terra are alone.

Bringing Stella Home

Point 1: Yes, it passes. Named female characters include: Stella McCoy, Danica Nova, Anya Sikorsky, Tamu, Lady Borta, Lady Zeline, Sergeant Maria.

Point 2: Yes; in most of Stella’s scenes, she’s talking with Tamu or Borta or one of the other Hameji women. Also, since Danica is the captain of the Tajji Flame and Anya is the chief pilot, they interact quite a bit.

Point 3: Yes, but just barely. In most of their scenes together, Stella and Tamu are talking about Qasar or the harem or sex. There are a couple where they talk about each other and their past, but it all relates back to their captivity under the Hameji. At one point later in the book, Anya goes AWOL and Danica has to talk her down, which is probably the scene that makes the book pass, but a hardcore feminist might argue that that conversation is indirectly about a man. Still, I’m counting it.

Desert Stars

Point 1: Yes, there are plenty of women. In fact, as you can see from this list of non-minor characters, there are almost as many women as there are men:

Female	Male
Mira	Jalil
Shira	Sathi
Zayne	Hamza
Tiera	Rumiya
Lena	Gregor
Surayya	Kariym
Amina	Ashraf
Rina	Ibrahim
Sarah	Lars
Michelle	Nash
	Mark
	Will

Point 2: Yes, plenty of these women talk to each other. Surayya and Amina are practically joined at the hip, Tiera, Shira, and Lena all have private conversations with Mira, and the only time Rina even talks is when she and Mira are alone.

Point 3: While most of the conversations between the female characters revolve around men and marriage, Tiera talks with Mira about honor, and Rina talks with Mira about leaving home. Without spoiling too much, there are other conversations that have nothing to do with men, though they happen off-stage and only get reported second-hand. Either way, I’d say this book passes.

None of this is to say that a good story must pass the Bechdel test. Lawrence of Arabia, for example, doesn’t have a single female actress–not one single actress!–and it’s an amazing film. As a counterpoint, I’m sure there are plenty of good stories out there (most of them probably anime or manga) that do not pass the reverse Bechdel test.

However, it is a good measure of female presence and how much the story is driven by men. And as a lens through which to view the wider culture, it offers a surprising and somewhat disturbing perspective on male-domination in fiction.

New city, new life, new writing project

This is going to be a quick post (very quick), since it’s 1:00 am and I am TIRED. FYI, it might not be edited all that much. What the heck–it’s my blog anyway.

So today I left home to move into the Barlow Center for the Washington Seminar! Took the train (Dad had an accident a block from the station–yikes! A minor one, but still…); left around 6:30 am and arrived at 1:30 pm. Took the metro to the Barlow Center, unpacked, walked up to the office for my internship (it’s only a 15 minute walk!), then made new friends and hit up the city!

It’s going to be a good semester.

I’ll probably start a separate blog for all the stuff that I’m doing in Washington DC. It might be a little while before I get it all set up, but I’ll probably run it roughly the same way as my Jordan 2008 study abroad blog. Still thinking about that.

But, more importantly (at least as concerns the stuff I write about on this blog), I started a new novel today! After much deliberation, I settled on the title To Search the Starry Sea. It’s a space opera science fiction novel that rough parallels The Odyssey, at least in the first part.

The main character is a girl named (at least for now) Katrione. She lives with her mother on the family estate, a medium sized moon orbiting a gas giant planet far from civilized society. Her father was lord of the estate, but he went off to war a long time ago and hasn’t returned.

The novel starts when a woman starship captain piloting the ship Minerva arrives with some limited news of Katrione’s father’s survival, and gives her the encouragement she needs to be more aggressive and proactive about rescuing her father, even if it means crossing some gender-based boundaries in the starfaring society.

I’m totally discovering this story as I write it. I got stuck on the second paragraph, wondering what sort of things Katrione would be doing before the Minerva arrives–what she does in her spare time–and when the answer came to me (reading a novel), it opened up about a dozen interesting story possibilities. Things just flowed…at least until I realized I need to come up with more character names. Blech.

Also, after working so hard to polish and revise Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, it is very difficult to get over the fact that this draft doesn’t need to be immaculate. I’m writing down sentences and paragraphs and thinking “this is SO telly,” but I can’t do any better at this point because I don’t know the story.

The important thing at this point is not to perfect the craft but to perfect the story, and that’s a HUGE transition from everything I’ve been doing the last 6 months. I just need to tell myself that until I believe it.

Anyway, I am definitely excited for this story. VERY excited! And excited about Washington DC–it is going to be a very, very interesting semester. And hopefully fun as well!

Christmas break 2009

Christmas was great this year! I spent it in Texas, with my extended family–the family on my dad’s side, who I almost never see. The break has been a lot of fun so far! No school or work obligations, lots of time to lay back and relax, plenty of games to play and books to read, plus fun people to hang out with–it’s been great!

Most of my cousins are young teenagers right now, and are a lot different than I remember. However, I was able to get some presents for them that I think worked out well. David is into his iPod, so I got him some U2 albums (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and Joshua Tree). Savannah and Nash are both avid fantasy readers, so I got Savannah Mistborn: The Final Empire and Nash Victory of Eagles (the one chain bookstore in Midland didn’t have His Majesty’s Dragon, so I got him another from the series). Daniel, I didn’t know what to get, so I gave him my old camera.

Ashley (who is older) was telling me about how she lived abroad and wants to spend some time in Australia, so I got a travelogue on Australia by the same guy who did A Walk in the Woods. Based on her reaction, I think she’s going to like it!

It was much easier to get stuff for direct family, since I know them better. For Kate, I got Soulless, a steampunk / paranormal mystery novel that had an awesome release party at World Fantasy 2009. I don’t know if she’ll like the book, but the party was very steampunk / regency fantasy with the cosplayers, so I think she will. I got Danny The Screwtape Letters, since I know he likes that kind of religious fiction–turns out he’s been meaning to read it for a while! Mykle, I got the first book in C. S. Friedman’s latest series, since I know that she’s his favorite author–24 hours after Christmas, he’s already 200+ pages into it! And for Sarah and Mykle, I got them both $20 gift certificates to Pioneer Book in downtown Provo. They were very happy with that!

I wish I’d had the time to get presents for everyone in the family, but with moving out, coming here so quickly, and not having a car (or much of an idea what they wanted), it just wasn’t very practical. I did get my mom a gift certificate to B&N, but I haven’t gotten anything for my dad yet. I will, though–he wants stuff from our Christmas memories, and I happen to have all my old childhood journals in my carry on luggage. Lots of Christmas memories in those!

I’m satisfied with what I got, even though it wasn’t all that much. Besides the generic clothes, socks, ties, candy, popcorn, and other stuff, I got a spiffy tool kit from Robin and a flexible tripod from pop. Very nice! They will add some weight to my luggage, but I think I can give some of it to mom or pop to bring home.

As far as writing goes, I’m less than 13k words from the end of Bringing Stella Home 2.0. It’s not quite ready for alpha readers yet, but I want to get it ready soon (it’s going to take so much work! <sob>). If I average 2.6k words over the next five days, I’ll have it finished in time to start something new by new years!

That’s the goal. As for what the next novel is going to be about…let’s just say it’s Homer’s Odyssey meets C. J. Cherryh and Ursula K. Le Guin in space, where Telemachus is a girl and the story is primarily from her point of view.

I hope I can pull it off!